Is Spam Defense actually working?

[Ocean West]

I am also using CleanTalk and these spammers from India seem to be on the rise again, registering away with a full lengthy bio with links. 

[Marc]

There does seem to have been an uptick in spam lately. From what you are describing, it sounds like they are manually registering. Unfortunately, thats not something any spam measure is going to be able to prevent, as they are no different in that respect to any other user

[Randy Calvert]

To help reduce the impact of spam on my site, I’ve done the following:

- Using Cloudflare, I’ve blocked countries where I have very little real user traffic from but high spam. (For me it was Russia, China, and India.)

- Using CleanTalk to catch bad emails/IP addresses. (Ones that do get through, I login to the CleanTalk site and report.)

- Using @Adriano Faria’s Enhanced Link Moderation plugin to auto moderate any posts from users with less than 30 content items or that has been a member less than 14 days.  This does not stop the spam but it does prevent user impact from it.  It makes identification very easy (it auto reports) and I just flag the user as a spammer. 

 

[CheersnGears]

+1 on @Randy Calvert's suggestion of CleanTalk.  If you're not a Cloudflare user, Cleantalk can also block IPs by country and prevent signups in the first place.  It's $8 per year, but they also give you extra options and bonuses to extend your subscription for free.  Their support is also fantastic.

Edited June 29, 2022 by CheersnGears

[Washerhelp]

I too am fed up with Spammers from India. I get 2 or 3 signing up virtually every single day, relentlessly. Many post spam and are instantly banned, but many do nothing, which is puzzling. Is there no way to ban registrations by country in Invision?

Just a note, I discovered that if you run Google Ads, your account can be closed for banning specific countries from accessing your site via a firewall or CDN as Google doesn't allow it, so that's not an option for me. Whereas banning from registering should be OK.

[Marc]

The only real way to tell what country someone is coming from is via IP address, and since you can add a ban for IPs, then we already have that functionality. You would just add the IPs needed

[Washerhelp]

Thanks Marc, would you need a range of IPs and are they available for specific countries? Adding one at a time would be little different from just flagging as spammers?

[Marc]

It would be a range of IPs usually, yes. If you google country IP ranges there are many lists of these

[Washerhelp]

Many thanks Marc, it would be highly useful if Invision could facilitate country blocking as an option. I don't know if there are any reasons I'm unaware of that mean you can't - or shouldn't. I appreciate a lot of communities would not want to block entire countries as they are for "all" but so many communities are aimed predominantly at specific countries and do not need members from all over the world. Mine for example is aimed only at UK.

[Marc]

I'm not sure what you mean by us facilitating this. The only way you can block a country is by IP, and we provide that ability already.

[Washerhelp]

Hi Marc, I mean being able to go to part of the dashboard, and select a country, and it's just done. As opposed to having to research the internet to try and find the ip ranges, and worry if they are accurate or not - and if the ranges might change sometime.

I can see how to ban an ip address in "ban settings" but I just found a site that generates a list of India IP addresses but don't know how accurate it is, or how to put them into Invision. The list is 8,973 lines long!

 

[Marc]

You would be blocking ranges, not individual IPs. But yes, it would indeed take you quite some time to block a whole country from registering.

[Washerhelp]

Just now, Marc Stridgen said:

You would be blocking ranges, not individual IPs. But yes, it would indeed take you quite some time to block a whole country from registering.

ha ha it's less hassle to just ban them when they come

[Marc]

Have you switched over to using thew new captcha method also?

[Washerhelp]

Which one is that Marc? I use reCAPTCHA V2 at the moment. I've sort of assumed they are manual registrations as it's about 1 or 2 each day but presumably could be bots?

[Marc]

We added hcaptcha as an option, which appears to be better at stopping spammers, so it may be worth taking a look at that

[Washerhelp]

Thanks Marc, I've just signed up to hcaptcha, but I'm really confused about all the talk of "earnings"?

[Marc]

Im not sure what you are referring to there. Please could you let me know?

[Washerhelp]

I signed up and logged into dashboard and there are 3 menus - Earnings - Analytics - Referrals, plus there's this in the FAQs -

 

How much should I expect to earn from hCaptcha?#

Site earnings vary based on three key factors: the number of answers users supply, the correctness of those answers, and real-time demand for the work.

It is difficult to predict exactly what your earnings will be, as prices for a given job type vary based on the demand in the system as represented by bid prices.

 

[Marc]

You would need to read through their documentation on that to see what they are referring to here. It sounds like its people testing captchas from what it says there

[opentype]

4 minutes ago, Washerhelp said:

How much should I expect to earn from hCaptcha?

Nothing. I am using it for quite a while on multiple sites. 
Install it for the spam protection, not for the potential rewards. 

[Washerhelp]

4 minutes ago, opentype said:

Nothing. I am using it for quite a while on multiple sites. 
Install it for the spam protection, not for the potential rewards. 

Aye I'm not remotely interested in earning anything, nor did I have the faintest idea you could. Just confused because all I am interested in is using the spam protection but the dashboard is talking about earnings so far etc and threw me a curveball.

[My Sharona]

1 hour ago, Marc Stridgen said:

We added hcaptcha as an option, which appears to be better at stopping spammers, so it may be worth taking a look at that

I searched for hCaptcha in the ACP search but it didn't return anything. Where is the option located, please?

ETA: nevermind, I found it with "captcha" search. 

 

 

Edited July 29, 2022 by My Sharona

[teraßyte]

1 minute ago, My Sharona said:

I searched for hCaptcha in the ACP search but it didn't return anything. Where is the option located, please?

 

TYIA

Are you using 4.6 or an earlier version perhaps? The new hCaptcha option is available only in 4.7.0:

 

[My Sharona]

6 minutes ago, teraßyte said:

Are you using 4.6 or an earlier version perhaps? The new hCaptcha option is available only in 4.7.0:

 

Right. Thank you. I edited my post to say I found it by searching for "captcha", leaving the "h" off.

To answer your question, I am running both. Different sites, though now that I am confident in 4.7, I will probably upgrade the others soon.